With its incredible rise to popularity, Pinterest has become a big target for spammers. New systems have been implemented to help identify and report spam. The Pinterest quality team has been busy analyzing report data and are now making a move to ban these fraudulent Pinners — forever. The bans will be “removed for good.”

Users may see a drop in followers in this clean sweep of spammers. Pinterest estimates that 99% of users will lose less than 10 followers. The Pinterest team is also exploring ways to prevent these accounts from ever being created in the first place.

Postscript by Matt McGee: According to Mashable, several large brands and other popular Pinterest accounts are losing hundreds of thousands of followers in the aftermath of Pinterest’s anti-spam measure this week. Pinterest shared this statement with Mashable:

“We reached out yesterday directly to the accounts that would see the biggest drop to let them know and assure people that it had nothing to do with their pinning. In fact, the more authentic, interesting and popular you are, the more likely you were to be targeted.”

About The Author

Greg Finn is the Director of Marketing for Cypress North, a company that provides world-class social media and search marketing services and web & application development. He has been in the Internet marketing industry for 10+ years and specializes in Digital Marketing. You can also find Greg on Twitter (@gregfinn) or LinkedIn.